Britain may never solve one of the biggest problems in the housing market

Two women study houses for sale in an estate agent's window in London. Yui Mok / PA Wire / Press Association Images LONDON — The UK will need to almost constantly build more homes than it ever has done before in order to address the chronic lack of supply that has helped push house prices in the UK skywards in recent years, a new academic paper released last week argues.

With this outcome incredibly unlikely given the consistent failure of consecutive governments to build as many homes as needed, it remains highly likely that housing will continue to become more unaffordable in the UK, the academics from the University of Reading argue.

"The formal conditions required to stabilise affordability are now known; in the long run, the housing stock must grow at the same rate as real household income. This condition is straightforward but probably impossible to achieve - in practice, the housing stock grows much more slowly than the economy as a whole," the paper's summary notes.

"Furthermore, the greater is the responsiveness of housing demand to changes in income, the faster affordability is likely to worsen."

House prices in the UK have climbed drastically since the 1980s, with the period since the global financial crisis seeing particularly rapid inflation. The average house price in the UK is now around £217,000, compared to roughly £150,000 in early 2005, data released by the ONS earlier in April showed.

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Much of that rapid price growth — particularly since the financial crisis — is down to the fact that supply is too low and demand is too high for housing, creating an imbalance which pushes up prices and makes buying a home more difficult.

This is a problem recognised by successive governments, which have pledged widespread house building to combat this imbalance.